Football fans falling prey to World Cup ticket scams

May 29, 2018

Football fans falling prey to World Cup ticket scams

For a scammer, what’s better than scamming a person into giving them money? Scamming the same person twice!

Well, it seems a lot of this “double whammy” has been going on online, as people desperately look to buy tickets for the upcoming football World Cup. These tickets are a nightmare to come by, with all kinds of safety regulations.

Things like being able to buy only one ticket per person, or needing to supply FIFA with your passport number just to buy a ticket – those are just some of the roadblocks making it very difficult to go and watch the world’s most important secondary thing.

However, there’s this thing called “guest ticket”, which allows people to buy up to three tickets. Scammers have taken this opportunity, bought these tickets and are now re-selling them online (they’ve sold out in the meantime).

Now, it’s no big deal re-selling football tickets, that’s being done since the beginning of time (or football). The problem is in the fact that a) nobody guarantees you’ll get the tickets once you pay for them; and b) nobody guarantees they’ll be valid because you need your name engraved on them.

Still, people seem to be buying them online, and for prices inflated to high heaven.

But that’s just one part of the scam. The second part is that people are giving these scammers their personal information, sometimes even payment information, in the process.

All of this has been spotted and investigated by experts at Kaspersky Lab, which are urging football fans not to buy tickets from sources that aren’t official. So, FIFA or nothing, boys and girls.